


We’ll Find It (I Know, I Know)

by luninosity



Category: Actor RPF, Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Coffee, Confessions, Couch Cuddles, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff With Emotions, Homelessness, M/M, Protective Chris, True Love, in the past though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 00:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3708391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You were <i>homeless,” </i>Chris says, “and you didn’t tell me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	We’ll Find It (I Know, I Know)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boopboop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boopboop/gifts).



> Written at boopboop's suggestion, as per [this video of little Sebastian Stan playing a homeless boy in a subway](http://luninosity.tumblr.com/post/115679469684/dangerhamster-sheisraging-i-actually-had-the). Yay for friends and enablers.
> 
> Title from Sister Hazel’s song of that name. It just seemed to fit.

Chris needs a second to process. In fact, Chris needs many seconds to process. He stares at Sebastian—at his fiancé, his significant other, his partner in life and acting and every last minute of their shared future—and tries.  
  
Sebastian, evidently unaware of the impact his casual words’ve just had, inquires, “Would you like coffee, because I was thinking I’d make more, but I don’t think I can drink a whole pot?”  
  
_“You were fucking homeless and you didn’t tell me!”_  
  
Sebastian opens his mouth. Closes it. Sets down his empty mug, clink of porcelain on table like the cracking of the world.  
  
“You didn’t _tell_ me,” Chris says again, soul cracking too.  
  
Two minutes ago they’d been discussing Chris’s next prospective script. A chance to play genius, driven mad, losing his home, forced to wander the streets. Homeless, in fact; and Sebastian’d glanced up from his cup of vanilla-coconut cream and caffeine and said, calmly, “If you want advice I can try to help, _Mamă_ and I spent a month or so living in a New York subway, when we first arrived, when we were homeless…”  
  
“I told you,” Sebastian says. “I am telling you now. And I did tell you, when we moved in together, when I said it’d be amusing to have a view of the sign for the station that used to be the warmest.”  
  
Chris can _feel_ his own eyes get wider. Shocked. “I thought—I don’t know, I fuckin’ thought—I don’t know what I thought! You like being warm!”  
  
“I do.” Sebastian sits up more, curling one leg under him: awkwardly graceful as a water-bird, a long-limbed egret, or a colorful firebird, maybe, a creature out of snowy-forest legend. One that’d lived in a New York subway, and been reborn as a brilliant actor and generous man. “I was very young, and it felt like an adventure. Well. Mostly an adventure. Anyway it was only a little over a month, and then my mother played the keyboard for a man with kind eyes who smiled and bought us dinner and came back the next day.” And the love in his voice, for that stepfather who’d taken him in and bought him a telescope and called him son, glints bright and pure and unalloyed. The menacing shades of Alzheimer’s and memory failure and plaintive cries of _unfair, no, why him, please make this not be real_ stand no chance, confronted with Sebastian’s love.  
  
Chris knows that love. He’s been fortunate enough to have a large portion of it directed his way.  
  
And Sebastian never told him. Never gave him this last secret.  
  
“Chris,” Sebastian says, eyes steady and trusting and true as sapphires, one hand reaching his way.  
  
Chris, shaking, whispers, “You wanted coffee—” and grabs the mug and flees. Kitchen. Solitude. Himself and Sebastian’s sugary caffeine. The mug provides no answers, but it does yawn at him expectantly, wanting to be filled, wanting to _help_. He sets it on the counter. Scrubs hands over his face.  
  
Sebastian. Sebastian living on the streets. Sebastian, beautiful and young and seeing the world as an adventure, sleeping cold and dirty in a New York subway, watching with curious eyes as men smiled at his mother, or—God—at _him_...  
  
Sebastian’s here. Here and cherished and plainly not dreadfully traumatized and above all safe. In their apartment, in their life.  
  
Chris, on the other hand, might be a little traumatized.  
  
Blankets, he thinks. Coffee. Heat. Soft things. Everything, anything, to banish the knowledge of concrete pillows and damp soggy underground air, humid with subway-bodies in the day, deserted and shadowed with unknowable shapes at night. He makes coffee. Extra whipped cream in defiance of Sebastian’s half-ignored Winter Soldier diet. Chocolate squares as a garnish.  
  
Sebastian stares at this sugary fantasia incredulously when Chris comes back to the living room. Chris doesn’t give him a chance to comment, only goes into their bedroom and scoops up pillows and the quilt that his sister made them as an engagement-present, red-white-blue and black-silver fluff, teasing nod to the story of them. Captain America and the Winter Soldier. Together until the end of the line; and Chris’s heart aches. Captain America can’t keep Sebastian cherished and protected. Can’t take away the memories.  
  
He plops quilt and pillows atop his fiancé. Sebastian flails around and emerges from eager bedding, hair in his face. “Chris, seriously—”  
  
“What else,” Chris says, begs, pleads, “what else, I can order pizza, you like pizza, pizza’s hot, or, um, more cushions, this couch’s kinda old, maybe it’s not soft enough, I will totally buy us a new couch, want a new couch, or—”  
  
Sebastian launches a pillow at him. Chris stops talking. And kind of wants to cry.  
  
“Chris.” Sebastian’s eyes’re very blue: pale as watercolor skies in winter, but not at all cold. Shining, instead. “Come here. Please.”  
  
Chris sits down beside the heap of quilt and fluff. Tentative. Anxiety clawing at his bones. He’s a stupid kid from Sudbury who used to wear track suits and chug beer, he cares about the environment and trees but he can’t make things right for the one person he loves above all else, he’s never known what he’s doing and of course Sebastian never told him this last secret, except Sebastian thought he _had_ , and clearly Chris was just too dumb to get it—  
  
“Stop that.” Sebastian actually leans over and taps Chris’s forehead with a pianist’s finger. Chris blinks.  
  
That glorious multifaceted voice continues, in the pause of Chris’s confusion, “I can hear you thinking. And you’re not stupid. I sort of told you without directly telling you; I knew you didn’t understand me, and I let you go on not knowing. I’m sorry about that.”  
  
“But,” Chris says. “You didn’t—you don’t have to—if you didn’t want to tell me—”  
  
“I did.” Sebastian sighs. “I’m not ashamed of it. Not the way society thinks I ought to be, in any case. Yes, we lived in a subway. For five weeks. And I slept on the ground, and my mother made money by playing a broken keyboard and putting out a cup for contributions. I’m not saying it was healthy. But we never starved, we made enough for cheap fast food most days, and we had working toilets and nobody enacted curfews or food rations or tapped our phone lines—” Chris winces, thinking: Communist Romania, revolutions, oh, Sebastian.  
  
“I didn’t want you to worry,” Sebastian admits. “Or to—to think of me differently. As someone who lived that.”  
  
This time Chris sighs. The pillow Sebastian’d tossed his way worries too, lying fretfully on the floor.  
  
Sebastian looks momentarily thoughtful, then slides over on the couch, bringing the quilt, and takes Chris’s wistful arm and drapes it around his own shoulders, nestling in. Chris looks down at his face; Sebastian’s smiling, bright and impish. Chris ends up smiling back, and murmurs, “You want to be held…” and puts the other arm around him too.  
  
“I love you,” Sebastian says. “I know you. You and the blankets.”  
  
“The blankets adore you,” Chris tells him, holding him, feeling that beloved weight tucked into his arms. “And I adore you. I love you. I don’t think of you differently. Or, hell, I don’t know. I want you to be warm and safe and next to me. I don’t want you to be cold. But I kinda always want that, so.”  
  
“So…”  
  
“So you’re here and warm and safe. With me.” He tugs Sebastian further into his lap. This position doesn’t really work for two grown super-soldier-sized men, but he’s got an overwhelming need to cuddle the man he loves right fuckin’ now, tender and protective, and Sebastian’s not objecting. Like he knows exactly what Chris needs.  
  
Which he does. He’s Chris’s anchor, Chris’s sanity, Chris’s calm space in the eye of the world’s hurricane, forever.  
  
“I think you’re the strongest person I know,” he says, “but that’s not exactly new either, y’know?” and Sebastian kisses his chin, this being the easiest spot to reach. “Chris?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“If you need something to do for me…”  
  
“Anything.”  
  
“I do like hearing you say that. Hand me the coffee that you so impressively made—thank you for the chocolate, by the way—and get your script, and we can talk about your character while you hold me.”  
  
“I can do that,” Chris agrees, because he _can_ do anything with Sebastian real and solid in his arms, and stretches successfully for coffee-mug and script-pages without shifting position more than a fraction. He keeps Sebastian settled in his lap, those long legs spilling lazily out across the couch under their patriotically happy quilt; he wraps his spare arm around his fiancé’s shoulders as Sebastian cradles chocolate-infused coffee in both hands, and flips open his script so they can look at it together.


End file.
